Project "PUMMEL"

Adulterated olive oil, food wrongly marked as organic or packaging made of contaminated recycled materials: Food fraud and scarcity of resources are major economic and social topics. While retailers and consumers find it hard or impossible to detect such fraudulent, inferior products, they can cause substantial harm to the health of individuals and to the finances of businesses.

Qualitative and quantitative analyses of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is advantageous when trying to identify fake food and inferior product quality. Currently, these tests are lab-based and therefore time-consuming and cost-intensive and require specialist staff to operate equipment and evaluate data.

The PUMMEL research project aims to address these issues by developing sensitive and selective point-of-use analytics to detect VOCs tailored to individual cases of application. The project is a collaboration between the three Fraunhofer Institutes IPMS, IVV and IME.

Development of a mobile GC system using two lead applications

Analysis of volatile organic compounds plays an essential role in quality control. Most of the time, VOCs can be used for the non-destructive detection of product characteristics. Some VOCs are characteristic and unique for underlaying chemical and biological processes, others can be correlated to changes in product characteristics as in food fraud.

The PUMMEL research project therefore aims to develop fast, mobile and cost-effective solutions for VOC identification.  The main focus of the project is the development of a mobile, easy-to-operate and robust gas chromatograph sensor system.

This development will consist of three stages: The first stage involves the development of a chip-based, miniaturized GC component, which also contains a temperature-controlled multichannel GC column with an application-specific filling. The second stage aims to develop a system with flexible sample pretreatment. Finally, fast evaluation strategies, validation of the demonstrator as well as benchmarking will be established. The focus will be on user-friendliness to enable point of use analysis by people not specialized in analytics.

The new system for mobile gas analysis will be demonstrated using two industry-relevant lapplications: Ultimately, the PUMMEL system should provide reliable detection of food fraud, for example in olive oil, fish or organic food, as well as contaminants in recycled plastic materials at the point of use.

Joint interdisciplinary development

Fraunhofer Institutes IPMS, IVV and IME have joined forces and combined their core areas of expertise in chemical sensor systems, GC measurement methods and sensor development so that the mobile gas chromatograph sensor system can be successfully developed by an interdisciplinary team.

Our Fraunhofer Institute IME has GC reference devices and our researchers develop complex sample preperation and measurement methods. They also define the requirements for the device as a basis for simple chromatogram evaluation.

The overall design will ultimately integrated in such a way that Fraunhofer IVV scientists will contribute their specific expertice in sensor and device development as well as performance and analysis of measurements, and the GC component of Fraunhofer IPMS will be integrated. This involves the development of a chip-based, miniaturized GC component that includes, among other things, a temperature-controlled multichannel GC column with application-specific filling.